ABSTRACT
In her essay on the Antigone, Eliot concludes that it ‘represents that struggle between elemental tendencies and established laws by which the outer life of man is gradually and painfully being brought into harmony with his inward needs’.1 The resonance that she finds in Sophocles’s play reflects her sense of the necessarily close, but highly problematic, relationship between the self and the world, and she sees in the Antigone an expression of the possibility of progress, through history, towards a greater harmony between the two. Her comments in this piece reflect her concern, as a novelist, both to offer criticisms of aspects of the outer social and political spheres of the world which she depicts, and to address the closely related question, to which she repeatedly returns, of how the individual adapts to, and interacts with, the environment. While, as we will see, she represents with great acuity the complex interactions between inner and outer, it is, perhaps, the former which is ultimately of the most profound interest to Eliot. Notwithstanding her strong sense of the formative force of the outer world on the self, she retains a faith in the crucial importance of the inner life of the individual as the key to positive change in that outer world, for it is only through individual action, which may run counter to dominant social and cultural formations, that change can be achieved.
